Car maker likely to stay popular in Australia

National Motoring Editor

The news that Toyota will shut its manufacturing facilities in Australia by the end of 2017 will be a shock to tens of thousands of Australian workers, but it's unlikely to upset Australian car buyers.

The Australian-made Camry is comfortably the best-selling mid-sized car on the market - last year it outsold its closest rival by more than three-to-one - but it is outsold by two other Toyotas, the Hilux and Corolla.

And it is only the sixth best-selling car on the market.

About 70 per cent of Toyotas produced in Australia are exported, which is the model the government wanted local manufacturers to adopt to achieve the economies of scale crucial to modern vehicle manufacturing. The Productivity Commission estimates a factory needs to produce 300,000 cars annually to be profitable; as Australia's biggest car maker, Toyota was managing just over a third of that, with 106,252 cars last year.

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But Toyota is arguably the best placed for life after local manufacturing.

Many Australians think all its cars are already imported, and the sales figures would suggest they're more than happy with that.

For 17 years Toyota has been the top-selling brand and it enjoys a dominant market share of almost 20 per cent.

Whereas Ford and Holden rely on their locally produced models to bolster sliding sales, Toyota is a strong player - or dominant - in almost every market sector it competes in.

Heading that list are SUVs and four-wheel-drives, a market Toyota helped create in Australia.

Its LandCruiser was instrumental in the construction of the Snowy Mountains hydroelectric scheme in the 1950s, something that set the brand on its current path of being rugged and reliable.

The RAV4 popularised the now booming compact SUV market in the 1990s. And the Prado - at times the best selling off-roader in the country - doubles as the vehicle of choice for families, farmers and outback travellers.

While early Toyotas were considered cheap and behind local rivals in terms of their suitability for Australian families, their quality and durability was never in question. That reputation has helped cement the brand as reliable, if sometimes dull.

Combined with a desire to sell the top-selling model in every segment it makes Toyota a dominant player, both here and globally. But there's one market that Toyota has never won - the large cars that have until the past decade been the vehicle of choice for Australian families.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s Toyota was desperate to topple - or at least compete with - the locally produced Ford Falcon and Holden Commodore.

Its unloved Avalon and the current Aurion failed and have only even been modest sellers compared with the Big Two. In hindsight it helped the brand. History shows the large car market has collapsed and buyers have swarmed to SUVs as a replacement - the exact SUVs that Toyota is so strong in.